The Hummingbird's Daughter (15 page)

“Sit down, child,” Huila scolded. “You don’t see the other children squirming around like worms.”

And, later, “Teresa! You’ll fall out and break your neck!”

But Teresita could not sit still. And Huila herself was lost in the morning, hypnotized by the rolling of the wagon, the hips and breasts of the hills around her, the heat of the sun. Huila, in her mind, was seventeen. She had not yet been burdened with medicine and cures. She was dancing in the arms of her first love, his breath hot in her ear under the orange light of a rising moon. She smoked her cigar and thought of his hands, thought of him naked, felt him throb within her as if a great heartbeat had fallen between her legs . . . gone now, lost all these long thirty years. Gone to dust. But alive in her chest, strangely alive on her body, as if his touch had tattooed her skin, ghost love.

“Girl!” She puffed. “What did I tell you?” Puff. “Don’t come crying to me if you fall and kill yourself!”

Huila. Chugging through the morning like a little flesh locomotive, leaving gray whorls of smoke behind her in the haunted air. Then they heard the approaching whine of a thousand buzzing wings.

Huila’s wagon came around a bend to a scene of great wailing.

Doña Loreto’s old carriage was pulled off to the side of the road, and Don Tomás sat astride his horse, looking down with vague curiosity. Don Lauro Aguirre held a small pair of eyeglasses before his small eyes and peered down. Segundo had dismounted and stood, bent at the waist, also peering down at Buenaventura as he kicked and screamed, rolling around in the dust with his arms wrapped around his head.

Buenaventura bellowed curses: his famous new bowler hat lay in the dirt, out of reach.

They had ridden into a fast-moving swarm of yellow jackets. The wasps had come down the road in a buzzing, golden cloud, expanding and contracting as they came. For some reason, they had widened around the front riders, then clapped together like great hands around Buenaventura’s head. They had stitched his head with stings and exploded away, cutting west and veering over the mustard blossoms.

“Bees!” Tomás said. He shrugged. “I get stung every week.”

He and Lauro muttered to each other as Buenaventura sobbed and cussed.

Huila had Teófano pull her wagon over. She creaked down off the bed and took Segundo’s hand to hop to the ground.

“I’m getting older than the sun,” she said.

“Domestic bees,” Tomás lectured, “would know better than to sting a boy like this.”

Buenaventura sucked in a hitching breath and let loose a pathetic wail.

“Good God,” said Tomás, “you’d think this cabrón had been shot.”

“He’s just a child, compadre,” Don Lauro said. “His wounds are urticant.”

“They’re what?” said Tomás.

“What did he say?” said Segundo.

Huila bent over the boy.

“Move your hands,” she said.

“No.”

“Take your hands off your face.”

“No!”

“Desgraciado,” she said.

He took his hands away from his face.

“Good,” she said.

She took his chin in her hand and turned his head back and forth. She wiped the tears and snot off his cheeks and lips with her cuff. The stings were red and swelling.

“Hurts,” he said.

“You were born to suffer,” she said. “Your only choice is to endure it.”

Tomás raised his eyebrows at Aguirre. Aguirre nodded appreciatively.

Huila took a few more puffs of her cigar, then took it out of her mouth and held it in front of her. “Go ahead and cry,” she said. “It’s all right.” Then she extended the cigar toward his face. He screamed in panic. The horses shied away.

“You’re going to burn me!” he squealed.

Teresita stood in the wagon, staring at this scene in a strange kind of rapture. She couldn’t move. She forgot to breathe.

Huila did not burn Buenaventura.

She pressed the spit-soggy end of the cigar onto each sting, holding it there for a moment before moving on, leaving small prints on each welt, like brown watercolors of flowers.

Buenaventura immediately stopped crying.

“Remarkable,” said Aguirre.

Buenaventura sat up. “Doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Tobacco juice,” said Huila, looking up at Don Lauro. “Always good for bug stings.” She grimaced, held her hands to the small of her back, stretched. They could hear it crackle. “Ay. My backbone is getting rusty.”

Buenaventura jumped to his feet.

“Hey, it doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Don’t wash your face,” she ordered him.

Segundo offered Huila his arm as she turned to the wagon.

“Can I give you an arm up?” he asked.

“Why the hell not,” she replied.

The parade resumed.

In a blighted field of white grass, a hundred crows bowed to them over and over, cawing, bowing as they passed, over and over.

The travelers crossed themselves.

Rumor spread that one of the trees along the trail was heavy with yellowed corpses hung with ropes, their necks snapped and forming awful L’s, but nobody saw any such tree, though they came upon an exploded church, and standing before it an old madman with a white shirt, no pants at all, his long and astounding sex dangling in front, blood or some other black splash dried on his belly.

Then the Sierras chopped the bottom out of the eastern sky. The riders brought back deer, limp and bloody, hung across their saddles. Huila told the old story of the Yoem hunter who shot a doe and followed the trail of blood to a pool, where he found a beautiful maiden with her breast pierced by his arrow. People nodded, sighed. True, it was true. They called the deer the old name, in the old tongue: tua maaso.

They saw badgers, a lion on a rock. Eagles and hawks swooped down the terrible canyons, ruins vibrated with rattlesnakes. Small demons that the patrón called coatimundis glared at them with their hellish eyes, twitching their striped tails as they ran and giggled. People crossed themselves again and again. Unbelievable creatures and spirits stalked them and watched them and fled from their ruckus: red wolves and gray wolves; shaggy bears and jaguars. Layer upon layer of mountain rose beside them, mountains that could have exploded with Apaches at any instant, or soldiers, or bandits, or Americans. Demons slumbering in the narrow caves whispered their names, moaned in the night and vomited storms of bats. The rocks were blue, or red, or black, or golden. Then blue again, brown, white—or was that snow? Could that be snow? Millán the miner from far Rosario said it was the shit of seabirds, but he was shouted down. What pelicans could there be in the Sierra Madre?

Rabid dogs fled across the land, kicking up pale gusts of dust as they spun and snarled, turned sideways at speed and tore their own flanks with their spuming jaws.

Goggle-eyed faces peered down from yellow cliffs, scratched into the stone, or painted with red-berry dye, their grim mouths yawning or set in angry lines, fading with the centuries, but still rageful as the peregrinos hurried away.

They broke open sun-dried turds, pulled apart the hairy scats and found, among the long whiskers and mottled fur, small bones. The bright orange teeth of a gopher. Tiny skulls. A five-fingered foot that looked like a human hand, with long dark nails on each finger, smaller than Huila’s thumbnail.

“Coyote,” she said, “ate a devil.”

They hurried away, offering up puffs of breath with prayers in them small as the bones: “Jesús,” they gasped, “Ave María.” Huila took up the minuscule devil’s hand and wrapped it in a bit of tissue and slipped it in the pocket of her apron.

Owls visited them at night. Some thought the owls were witches. Some thought they were the angels of death. Some thought they were holy and brought blessings. Some thought they were the restless spirits of the dead. The cowboys thought they were owls.

One day, Buenaventura brought Teresita the most marvelous object of all. The tobacco stains were still upon his cheeks like huge freckles. He clutched in his fist a small stone, and on this stone was the imprint of a fish. She grabbed it and squinted hard at it, rubbed it, licked it.

“A stone fish,” Buenaventura said.

Huila took one look and said, “This is a miracle of God,” and made the sign of the cross, by now the favorite gesture of the Exodus.

Don Teófano said, “The work of the devil,” and also made the sign of the cross.

Old men insisted it was left over from Noah’s flood.

Aguirre had proclaimed it an excellent example of ancient Chichimeca stone carving.

Segundo had insisted a witch made it.

Tomás had simply walked away, telling him not to bother him with foolishness.

Buenaventura said, “I think it’s the seed of a fish.”

“What!” Teresita laughed.

“I’m going to put it in a bottle of water, see if it sprouts.”

“Fish don’t sprout!”

“What if they do?” he insisted. “I’ll be a rich man.”

“You’re already rich,” Huila said. “You don’t even know it.”

Buenaventura looked down at his rumpled suit and grimaced.

“What do shoes feel like?” Teresita asked.

“It’s like your feet went to jail,” Buenaventura said.

She made a face, too.

Huila, who didn’t have to go barefoot anymore, said, “It’s not so bad. You can step on stickers and not feel a thing.”

Teresita smiled.

“That’s what huaraches are for.”

“True.” The old woman nodded. “But shoes are more hard. Your toes are safe, the tops of your feet.”

“Like having hooves,” Teresita said.

And they mounted up, into Indian country: passing small as fleas on a rumpled blanket. The Río Navojoa, though broad, was shallower than the Fuerte and Segundo scouted a fine fording spot near another ferry raft. They made camp and watched the wagons cross the water like strange blocky ships, and the buckaroos played cards with a small company of gringo horse-hunters, come down to steal their herd back from a Mexican thief. And the leaves above their heads were turning yellow, something quite marvelous to see. Yellow and red, then falling like moths, spinning through the air.

This night’s camp was on a dry plain. Three Indian men walked into camp and hailed Tomás, asking for a meal. He fed them beans and steak and fried potatoes on pewter plates and fried brains in scrambled eggs. They ate with their fingers and triangular pieces of tortillas. They drank cocoa—it made them laugh. When they were done, they smoked with the men, then stood and said, “Lios emak weye,” and walked into the night without another word.